The DPDFFaculty Field Competition is now accepting research field proposals for the next fellowship cycle from tenured humanities and social sciences faculty interested in creating or reinvigorating interdisciplinary fields of study through the training of the next generation of researchers.

DPDF Critical Approaches to Human Rights research field director Amy Ross has been reporting from Guatemala at the trial of former president José Efraín Ríos Montt as an international observer for an Open Society Justice Initiative project.

Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum program director Bill O’Neillanalyzed legal decisions related to the pending appellate decision in the case against Haiti’s former president Jean-Claude Duvalier in an article in leading Haitian daily Le Nouvelliste [in French].

China Environment and Health Initiative program director Jennifer Holdawayreviews social science research in the emerging field of environment and health in China, with a particular focus on the impacts of pollution, in the June China Quarterly.

A new book by Abe Fellow Hirokazu Miyazaki (1998), Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance (University of California Press), examines the decline of high finance through the lens of Japan in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Join Wonkblog’s first book club at the Washington Post for a discussion of president Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (Liveright/Norton). Or watch a video of Katznelson’s talk with MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry about the book and New Deal resonance with contemporary US culture and congressional politics.

Former SSRC president Ken Prewitt warned of the risks carried by the congressional attempt to micromanage National Science Foundation grants in an op-ed for Science magazine and provided additional background on “The Congressional War on the Social Sciences” in an article for Pacific Standard.

New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Norris Chumley (2012) discussed Religion and the Public Sphere forums The Immanent Frame, Reverberations, and Frequencies as “creditable sources of scholarly research” in a Huffington Post article: “The Ivory Tower in Cyberspace: Is Internet Publishing Publishing?”

Original content now featured at SSRC Forums: “Amnesty for Boko Haram: Lessons from the Past,” a new African Futures essay by Alex Thurston on impediments to conflict resolution in Nigeria; “Congolese Crisis and Demographic Problems in the African Great Lakes,” a Kujenga Amani essay by Guy Aundu Matsanza on historical connections between contemporary conflicts; and “The Vatican Spring?,” a colloquy at The Immanent Frame on the election of Pope Francis, with thoughts from both scholars and religious leaders, including Michele Dillon, John Esposito, and James Martin, SJ.